


Home Is Where

by Penknife



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Backstory, Developing Relationship, Family, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-12-31 16:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21148643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penknife/pseuds/Penknife
Summary: Bodhi can't go back, but he's determined to keep moving forward.





	Home Is Where

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Luzula (Luzula_podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luzula_podfic/gifts).

Bodhi’s family is proud of him. When his application to the Academy is accepted, his mother is up before dawn the next day cooking, and aunts and uncles and cousins crowd the house by the time the morning’s chill is gone. The smell of the food is delicious, and for the first time he feels it start to be real that all this is going to change, because he’s leaving.

“You could let me help in the kitchen,” he tries, but no one will let him help in the kitchen, and anyway by now he can’t fit in the kitchen. His grandmother is making fried pastries, and he hovers in the doorway and tries to snatch them off the platter while they’re hot, and she raps his knuckles with her spoon. He steals one anyway while it’s hot enough to burn his tongue, exploding salty-sweet in his mouth, and thinks—it’s not forever. This is what it will be like to visit home.

But home has never been a place to visit, before. Home has been these familiar rooms, old stucco with the scent of cooking oil and spices soaked into the walls, noise from the floor above and below, sitting cross-legged with his back against the warmth of the boxy tiled stove on cold nights. It’s too hot after so much cooking, every window opened, little birds darting in to snatch crumbs as everyone talks at once.

They close the windows at night when the chill sets in, and someone starts playing the quetarra, a meandering tune that is probably a love song but still sounds sad. Children are being taken away to be put to bed, and Bodhi says goodbye to everyone as they leave even though he’ll probably see them again before he goes. It’s what you do, because you never know.

His uncle brings out a bottle of khyrr and hands it around. Bodhi pours some into his tea even though he’s tasted it before, a shock of bitterness that only slowly fades into a lingering honey aftertaste. He drinks and tries not to make a face. It’s traditional for celebrating someone leaving home, the traditional drink for the family of the parents of children chosen to be Jedi. It’s supposed to taste like pride mingled with tears.

“It’s a good job,” his uncle says, and he knows that. Everyone knows that. There’s little enough work on Jedha, and no other way to learn to fly besides signing on with one of the syndicates. He sees them in the street, swaggering spacers tossing coins to beggars and making more furtive deals with people who rely on spice to take them away from their troubles. He’d be ashamed to do that.

“I want to be a starfighter pilot,” Bodhi says, because the khyrr is as strong as it is bitter, and it makes the wildest ambitions of his childhood seem within reach.

“We don’t need those much on Jedha,” his uncle says. He doesn’t have an answer to that. They don’t need pilots at all on Jedha. There isn’t honest work for them here. But he’ll come home, if not weighted down with decorations for his bravery, at least with credits in his pocket and stories to tell. “Be careful what you say about home.”

He knows that, too. People here believe in the Force, and the older ones have opinions about whether the Jedi were as bad as the Empire paints them or as good as the few Temple Guardians who still wander the streets claim. There are people his grandmother’s age who say they’re glad the Jedi Order was broken before it could take anyone else’s children away, and yet the bottles of khyrr still come out for celebrations, no one saying whether they’re remembering tears or pride.

He knows better than to talk about these things, but he also knows that they aren’t the kind of things that young pilots talk about anyway. No one will care whether he believes in the Force. They’ll only care whether he can fly.

When it turns out that the answer to that question is “not well enough to be a starfighter pilot,” Bodhi writes a miserable letter home that he regrets sending the moment after he can’t call the transmission back anymore. He’s already starting to feel better by the time he gets an answer, training as a shuttle pilot and finding a place for himself in the anonymous rank and file.

_I’m sorry you aren’t doing what you wanted, but I’m not sorry to know that you’re safer_, his mother writes. _We are all so proud of you. _

Bodhi knows that’s not because of anything extraordinary he’s actually achieved. They’re proud of him because they love him. He can’t decide whether that makes him feel better or worse.

He writes dutiful letters home at intervals until he’s assigned to make runs back and forth from Eadu, where the secret research the science team is doing means that all transmissions are closely monitored. He knows that his other letters home were probably read, but knowing they will definitely be read makes him too self-conscious to come up with words.

“Tell me about your home,” Galen says, one day when Bodhi is waiting for Galen to pull together his notes and samples for Bodhi to take with him when he leaves. Galen never has the shipment ready on time, which Bodhi has decided is because Galen is obviously lonely here and wants to spin out his rare chances to talk to someone from offworld. The man is so carefully guarded here that he might as well be a prisoner.

“It’s just an ordinary place,” Bodhi says. “Not very exciting compared to Coruscant.”

“I spent several years as a farmer,” Galen says lightly. “I’m used to quiet places.”

“It wasn’t that quiet. I grew up in Jedha City.” He’s homesick sometimes himself, and he isn’t stuck on a storm-torn planet with a bunch of scientists who only want to talk about kyber. Bodhi wonders if Galen loves his research enough to make him happy here, or if it’s just a job for him, the best he could do for himself and his family.

“That’s where the Kyber Temple is, I think?” Galen says, although obviously he knows that it is.

“Yes, I’ve seen it,” Bodhi says, because that is the safest possible answer. You can’t miss it.

“The Empire maintains a fairly large presence there, I believe,” Galen says.

He nods in answer, because even his most opinionated uncles couldn’t disagree with that. “And there's a lot of recruiting there for the sector Academy, which is how I got here.”

“I imagine there’s some resentment of the Empire.”

“I don’t think they resent us,” Bodhi says, which is not honest, but seems safe.

“I find that hard to believe.”

He shrugs. “We’ve been stationing troops there for a long time. People are used to it.”

“You say ‘we’ when you talk about the Empire, not when you talk about Jedha. That’s … admirable.”

“I’m both,” Bodhi says, because he may have left home, but he’s still from where he’s from.

“I expect your family is proud of you,” Galen says.

“They are.” They’re back on firmer ground there.

“Do you tell them what you do for the Empire?”

“I tell them I fly shuttles. And other transports, sometimes.”

“But the things we do, the things that aren’t so pretty that we have to do, in order to preserve freedom in the galaxy ...”

Bodhi has seen things that weren’t pretty. Probably they were necessary. He wouldn’t have written home about them even if the transmissions weren’t being read.

“I just fly shuttles,” he says.

Galen turns and begins packing his datatapes and samples of kyber into a transport container, as if he’s only now remembered that Bodhi is waiting on him. “I expect one day they’re going to say all this was my achievement,” he says thoughtfully.

“All of what?”

Galen’s expression was wry. “The project I can’t tell you anything about. But one thing I don’t want anyone to forget is that we’re all a part of the things the Empire achieves. When the ultimate product is finished, we’ll all share part of the credit for transforming the galaxy.” He looks up at Bodhi over the transport container. “A man should be proud of the things he’s a part of.”

Bodhi takes the container and tries not to think about the conversation with Galen after he leaves. Probably Galen meant to encourage him. The thought probably ought to be encouraging.

It’s the better part of a year before Bodhi realizes that Galen is instead trying to subvert him, and by then he doesn’t think for more than a few shameful moments about reporting Galen. He’s already begun to be sickened every time Galen has another talk with him about the Empire’s latest achievements. The worst part is that most of the atrocities that Galen praises in his dryly measured tones are things that Bodhi knew about already. A few of them are things that he saw.

“I just wanted a job,” he says the day he can’t stand it anymore, his voice breaking on the words. 

At once, Galen stops his pleasant, relentless analysis of exactly what Bodhi has become a part of. He stands with his back to the wind, having offered to walk out to the shuttle with Bodhi despite the rain that whips against their faces. Bodhi understands now that it isn’t safe to speak freely inside.

“I know you did,” Galen says, as if he really does understand. “That’s why so many of us are here.”

He knows he’s stepping out onto dangerous ground, but it’s where he wants to be. “I want to do something. To make up for having worked for them.”

“There’s something you can do,” Galen says. He smiles at Bodhi like he’s proud to know him, and the wind whips the raindrops across his face like tears.

*****

It takes Cassian longer than he likes after Scarif to realize that Bodhi misses home. “Home” isn’t a word that Cassian uses much, and when he does, he means the Alliance, or maybe ironically whatever base they’re temporarily stationed on until they have to abandon it again.

When Cassian lets himself think about things that are lost, which isn’t usually a luxury he allows himself, it’s the friends who died at Scarif or in the battles that followed. He can’t wrap his head around the idea of missing his family, or missing Fest, except as a kind of distant dull ache like a wound that’s been numbed and bandaged and is therefore no longer interesting.

But it occurs to him after a shamefully long while that Bodhi had family in the Holy City on Jedha, and a place that he actually thought of as a home, and then abruptly that was gone. There’s nothing Cassian can think to say that won’t be entirely clumsy, but it stays on his mind. He’s used to thinking about every place and every person as replaceable, even though he knows some part of him knows that isn’t true.

“Where do you want to live when this is over?” Bodhi asks, stretched out on Cassian’s bed in the middle of the night in the chill of the Hoth base. They’ve finished having sex at least for the moment, and Cassian thinks neither of them can sleep and neither of them particularly wants to lie awake alone, which leaves talking. 

Cassian isn’t sure what to do with any assumption in that question, so it takes him a while to answer. “I expect there will still be some kind of Alliance force, or Republic force, or whatever it is we’re going to have.”

“You can’t actually live here, though.”

“I am actually living here as we speak.”

“Would you want to go back to Fest?”

“There’s nothing there,” Cassian asks, and then, more honestly, “There’s nothing there for me.” He wants to see Fest liberated from the Empire, badly, but he can’t imagine trying to make a place for himself there, or on any world full of civilians without blood on their hands.

“I want an actual home, on a planet that isn’t a military base,” Bodhi says. “Maybe not to stay, but at least to visit. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing to hope for.”

“It’s good to have hopes,” Cassian says, and his tone isn’t what he wants it to be. He has hope—he genuinely does believe that they can win, although he’s skeptical about the idea that he’ll personally survive the process—but not this kind, for some kind of softer life.

“Will you come here?” Bodhi tugs Cassian down to lean against his shoulder, which is an all too tempting place to lean. There are times when he wants to stay there and never move again, which alarms him a little. Bodhi runs a hand through Cassian’s hair, and Cassian lets him. “You don’t have to know,” Bodhi says. “Just tell me one thing you want, for when this is over.”

He wants to say that it won’t ever be over for him. He would say it if he weren’t silenced by the sheer bravery of Bodhi taking the loss of his family and the loss of his home and the infliction of the scars on his mind that won’t ever entirely heal, and still raising his chin and looking forward. He can try to look forward if Bodhi can try. 

“Somewhere to live for more than a few weeks at a time,” he says. It could be quarters in a base. He won’t try to strain his imagination too far. But he can remember, just barely, what it felt like to watch the leaves fall out his window and know that there would be new ones in the spring. The winter sunsets were bloody with mining dust and the summer sky was a sick yellow haze, but there was a sense of being anchored in time that he is aware that he’s lost. He has no internal sense of the turning seasons anymore.

“That’s probably possible, don’t you think?”

“I’m trying to be optimistic.”

“You’re bad at it.”

“I actually think we’re going to win. I think that makes me good at it.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

“Because of people like you,” Cassian says. He only has a few comforting truths about the world. That’s one of them.

“I’m an ordinary person.”

Cassian thinks Bodhi means it as modesty, but instead he finds himself saying, “I’m not sure I ever learned how to be an ordinary person.”

“You could take lessons,” Bodhi says.

“For you, I might try.”

“Good for you for trying,” Bodhi says, and he’s teasing, but it’s true, too, and there’s something in the words that uncurls into a place in Cassian’s chest he hadn’t realized was hollow.

“But first we’ll save the galaxy,” he says, trying to offer a little of that certainty in return, something to keep them both warm.

“We’ll do our best,” Bodhi says, and that’s all that the galaxy can reasonably ask of them to do. And maybe it’s reasonable of them to expect some kind of an “afterwards” from the galaxy in return. That might only be fair.

“Good for us for trying,” he says, and lets himself make a pillow of Bodhi’s shoulder.


End file.
